Revisiting the gypsy that I was

"As the light hits you, as you shift along the floor..." These opening lyrics from the enigmatic Kate Bush's "Oh To Be In Love" instantly transport me back almost 40 years ago to the night I met my first love, or so I thought.

Bush, herself only 17 when most of her smash-hit first album The Kick Inside was produced, goes on to sing: "I find it hard to place my face, how did I come to be here anyway, it's terribly vague what's gone before."

These words perfectly encapsulate the whirlpool of beautiful confusion in the aftermath of locking eyes with someone who completely entrances you.

Everything else, your friends, the party, the past, the future becomes background noise. All that matters is "our moment" (Bush, "Oh To Be In Love").

I had only just turned 17 when he spotted me, and only me, literally across a crowded room. We couldn't stop looking at each other and grinning and blushing (me) and anticipating that first caress and first kiss which was to come later that evening.

"Lightning strikes maybe once, maybe twice. Oh and it lights up the night". Stevie Nicks' lyrics from her nostalgic "Gypsy" describe that thrill of love, or is it lust, which is so rare yet so eternal in our memories.

Patti Smith asks the same question in her beautiful take on Springsteen-penned "Because the Night." I love the sensual trickle of piano chords at the start of this song and then the way it explodes into the chorus "Because the night belongs to lovers, because the night belongs to lust."

"Take me now, baby, here as I am

Pull me close, try and understand

Desire is hunger is the fire I breathe

Love is a banquet on which we feed."

And what a banquet, an emotional, sensual and sexual feast, all free, all fresh and hot and laid out and just for us two.

Bush also speculates on whether that all-encompassing passion you feel for the first time is love or lust in her song "Feel It", again from her eponymous first album.

"Nobody else can share this

Here comes one and one makes one

The glorious union, well, it could be love

Or it could be just lust but it will be fun

It will be wonderful."

Exactly, right? When you're 17 and collapsing into the arms and bed of someone who makes you feel electric all over, you're not over-analysing the situation. You're willingly swept up in a storm of sexual excitement and nothing or no-one is going to stop you swimming deep down into that ocean.

Like Stevie sings in Fleetwood Mac's "Sara": "Drowning in the sea of love where everyone would love to drown."

We want to die and be reborn again, we want to be breathless and cocooned, we want to be immersed and swallowed up.

"Sara" is such a gorgeous arrangement, again the soft piano lead-in then the highly personal yet typical riddle that are Nicks' lyrics. What is it about really?

Theories abound but I prefer to leave it a mystery. Stevie herself has said she deliberately writes ambiguous lyrics because her songs can then be interpreted to suit the listener. Generous, isn't she? That's why we love her.

But first love can hurt deeply especially when the lover is not as constant as the lovee. The wounds can last a lifetime which brings me to another of my go-to songs "Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters" sung by Elton John.

It's about disillusionment and the craziness of the music business and is used towards the end of the soundtrack to Cameron Crowe's semi-autobiographical flick Almost Famous.

It's the scene in which young Rolling Stone magazine scribe William rescues Penny, the sweet groupie, from a quaalude overdose in a New York Plaza Hotel room.

As he's walking her around the room, desperate to stop her from passing out, she looks him straight in the eyes and sadly whispers: "Why doesn't he love me?"

"He" being the love of her life, Russell, star lead guitarist for fictional band Stillwater.

And isn't that the question we all torment ourselves with when our love has been invited then cruelly rejected. It's not even technically "unrequited" because our lovers have expertly seduced us in the first place.

Ultimately, it's the thrill of the chase for them and that's when our hackles rise and we realize that we have to toughen up. My wide blue eyes were gradually not so trusting and my soul ever so slightly laced with wariness and singed by glowing embers of cynicism when it happened to me.

My go-to for these songs is definitely Heart, fronted by San Diego army brat sisters Ann and Nancy Wilson in the 1970s.

By the by, Nancy was also married to Crowe when he wrote and directed Almost Famous and she devised the faultless soundtrack, a musical love letter to 70s rock.

"Barracuda" by Heart gets the blood rising and is an angry rejection of rumors and mismanagement in the music industry but I like to sing along with it when I'm mad at all the predators, barracudas, in the dating scene.

When you drown in the sea in the love, you're pretty sharply resuscitated once you've been bitten by a few barracudas!